TuoCha.com

Is anyone familiar with http://www.tuochatea.com and have experience ordering from them? The have the lowest puerh prices that I've ever seen anywhere for the good stuff, like only $3.90 for a bundle of 5 100g Golden Melons and Bamboo puerh (both raw and cooked) for only $1.70 and $26 for a bamboo basked of 5 Six Famous Raw puerh cakes, which is good enough minimum order size of 2.5 kilograms of tea is not an issue. Although the one thing that has me a bit uneasy that the site might be a scam as they do not take credit cards but "by irrevocable Letter of Credit" such as bank wire transfers.

...as shown on that page, the biggest problem is really the overall costs; $10-20 for the wire transfer, and the generally HIGH overseas shipping charges. ICK.

So much for the prices that seem to be too good to be true even though they are legit, they are with the wire transfer fees. Still you always pay for overseas shipping with puerh either in the markup or when you order it direct from China. Still when they do start taking credit cards (like they claim to be working on) I might have to give them a try to stock up on a years supply or so of puerh.

jogrebe wrote:So much for the prices that seem to be too good to be true even though they are legit, they are with the wire transfer fees. Still you always pay for overseas shipping with puerh either in the markup or when you order it direct from China. Still when they do start taking credit cards (like they claim to be working on) I might have to give them a try to stock up on a years supply or so of puerh.

It still often ends up being cheaper. I pay them with Western Union, and you can use your credit card with WU, at least by phone and online. However, I have had trouble recently sending using the western union website to send $ to tuochatea, so I've had to do cash at a location, cuz the fees are $14 in person/online but $40 over the phone.

Anyway, I'm making a sampling order of one of most of their new cakes. Look at the livejournal community in two months to see what I get

True. My original thought was to sample most of their offerings before I go to save on time sampling them in China. But now, I'm not so sure. I'd rather spend the money on cakes I can't get there, like the Xizhihao/Yanqinghao stuff (can I get those in China any cheaper, I wonder?), or just save it and spend it on tea there.